Projectiles launched from gas guns are known to use sabots.
The inventors of the present invention are, however, unaware of any missiles launched from a gas gun which employ an aero-shell, technology to protect the missile from heat generated during the missile's movement through the atmosphere, spinning and pulsed propulsive bursts from the missile to control the direction of the missile, oversized propellant or oxidizer tanks to be used for delivery of propellant or oxidizer, or moving surfaces to induce lift during the portion of the missile's flight within the atmosphere.
The present inventors have developed a means of delivering supplies to earth or lunar orbit in order to assist space exploration. The current method of delivering propellant, food and other supplies to orbit is with rocket delivery. Rocket delivery is extremely expensive with a typical cost of about $5,000 per lb of payload delivered. The requirement for approximately 9 km/s delta V to attain earth orbit when coupled with the rocket equation yields only a few percent payload fraction for rocket delivery. Their method uses a hydrogen gas gun to first boost a rocket to high speed. This allows a smaller more efficient rocket to deliver the payload to orbit. The payload fractions obtained are thereby much higher than obtained by a rocket alone. Their higher payload fractions plus the re-usable hydrogen gas gun reduce the payload delivery cost by more than a factor of 10.
The present inventors have previously described using hydrogen gas guns to deliver payloads to orbit in the following published articles: “Livermore Proposes Light Gas Gun For Launch of Small Payloads”, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Jul. 23, 1990, pp. 78-80; “Shooting Right For The Stars With One Gargantuan Gas Gun”, Smithsonian Magazine, January 1996, pp. 84-91; and “The Jules Verne Gun”, Popular Mechanics, December 1996, pp. 54-57.